In 1940 Charles Hamilton Houston, a law professor at Howard University, hired a former student named Thurgood Marshall to be chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Their collaboration eventually saw Brown v. Board of Education issue a death blow to segregation. In time Marshall was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and Houston was immortalized as "the man who killed Jim Crow," thanks to his legal strategy.

Marshall and Houston's influence on the civil rights movement has been documented many times. But as Steven Teles notes in his thoughtful and well-researched book, there is a less familiar aspect of their legacy. The NAACP Legal Defence Fund was part of a diffuse network of liberal groups that reformed American law during and before the 1960s. Eventually a conservative counter-movement sprang up in response. One of Teles's central arguments is that the conservative legal movement has been profoundly shaped by the same liberal network it sought to displace. When it comes to the legal strategies and institutional structures they adopt, conservative and liberal law groups do not have distinct approaches. Rather both sides now follow a trail blazed by mid-century liberal reformers.

In the early 1970s economic conservatives felt frustrated by public interest lawyers in the mold of Ralph Nader. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Nader and other liberals used legal advocacy to do everything from regulate the car industry to (temporarily) abolish the death penalty. By the Nixon era, it had become common for conservative policies to make it through legislatures only to be overturned by public interest lawyers in the courts.

Conservatives established their own public interest firms to fight back. Environmental laws and other liberal reforms imposed a cost on business. The first wave of conservative public interest lawyers therefore saw business as their natural ally. Early conservative outfits such as the Mountain States Legal Foundation and the Pacific Legal Foundation, of Colorado and California respectively, cultivated local businesspeople as donors and board members.

This proved to be a mistake. Whereas the lawyers who staffed conservative foundations wanted to eliminate government regulation, the CEOs who funded them had a different goal: re-regulate in a manner more favorable to their industries. Being married to the chamber of commerce limited which cases the lawyers could accept and how outspoken they could be. That was not the only problem. As their names implied, the first generation of conservative firms had a regional focus. Not only did this mean they had no clout in Washington, but they were not as effective as the Wilderness Group and other liberal outfits, which organized themselves around particular issues.

Conservative legal organizations slowly remade themselves in the image of their liberal counterparts. Internally, leadership transferred from business people motivated by profits to libertarian lawyers motivated by philosophy. Externally, they obtained funding not just from corporations but also from charitable foundations. A new generation of conservative firms located themselves in Washington, where they too would do battle with legislatures.

Unlike their 1970s counterparts, today's conservative legal advocates often use sixties-style rhetoric to portray liberalism as the ideology of a corrupt establishment. "This populist stance would allow conservatives to turn Naderite cultural resources -- antiestablishmentarianism, suspicion of concentrations of power, claims of institutional self-interest, and temperamental populism--against liberal institutions." The goal has been to portray conservatism as the rightful heir of the public interest, but Teles suggests the effect has been to foster cynicism and distrust about the law.

The firm that has gone farthest to present itself as a friend of the little guy is the Institute for Justice (IJ). Whereas other right-wing public interest firms have specialized in fighting affirmative action, IJ deliberately avoids such cases. Its client list has included a low-income parent fighting a school board and a black hair salon owner threatened with closure by city hall. By "deregulating the inner city" IJ believes it can increase the appeal of libertarianism among African-Americans and other traditionally liberal groups. (Once that easy task succeeds, IJ says its next goal will be to turn its roof into a landing pad for high-velocity aerodynamic hogs).

As the conservative legal movement has sought to disassociate itself from business it has actively cultivated academic links. Half of Teles's narrative takes place inside law schools. He charts the rise of the Federalist Society, which fosters conservative jurisprudence and creates networking opportunities for right-wing law students and lawyers. To do so it employs the laudable means of organizing debates between conservative and liberal law professors.

Teles also documents the rise of the law and economics movement. Strictly speaking, it is possible to take an economic approach to legal analysis without embracing conservatism. But as Teles notes, the introduction of a law and economics program usually gives a law school a more conservative ethos. That was the point for the philanthropists who first funded such programs. In the words of an Olin Foundation executive: "If you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand. But if you said that you wanted to support law and economics, he would see that as a program with academic content . . . like many disciplines, it seems neutral but isn't."

Many conservative lawyers seem to see themselves as protagonists in an Ayn Rand novel: one heroic litigator who by working alone will win a huge case on the scale of Brown. In reality, effective legal reform often involves lots of unglamorous follow-up cases that make sure a precedent is enforced. The culture of the right-wing legal world places its representatives at a disadvantage in this regard. As Teles writes, "a belief system that does not celebrate an ethos of service, humility or collective endeavor is likely to be hampered."

Teles writes as a moderate rather than a conservative. Yet his overall portrait of legal conservatism is a gentle one. The deep ties between the conservative legal movement and the Bush administration go unexamined. John Ashcroft, the former attorney general who curtailed civil liberties after September 11, is a member of the Federalist Society. So is John Yoo, the justice department lawyer who infamously legalized torture--often used, we now know, against detainees who had already begun to talk. An administration devoted in principle to legal conservatism in practice upheld legal annihilationism. As during the civil rights era, U.S. liberals are still often left to make the case for justice on their own.

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